Vehicles such as lawn and garden tractors are often utilized with a variety of implements to perform various tasks. For example, they are used with blades to grade dirt or plow snow, with brushes to clean parking lots and sidewalks and with snowblowers to clean driveways, sidewalks and streets. The latter two types of implements require power to rotate the brush and the snowblower blade or auger. Typically this power is supplied by the PTO of a tractor.
Typical quick coupling devices provide for quick and easy coupling of the device to the tractor and of the implement to the coupler. The couplers are also provided with hydraulic actuators to swing the coupler about a horizontal axis and the implement about a vertical axis to manipulate the implement during its operation.
In utilizing such couplers with implements requiring PTO driving power, structural interference problems can occur between the coupler structure and the PTO drive shaft as the implement is swung about its vertical axis with the coupler or about its horizontal axis with the implement. Specifically, interference can occur between the hydraulic angling cylinder and the PTO drive shaft.
When an operator wants to change the implement being utilized with the tractor, time and cost would be saved if he did not have to provide a separate coupling device to attach driven or non-driven implements to the tractor.